Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and
intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the
18th century in
Western Europe, and gained strength during
the
Industrial Revolution. It
was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms
of the
Age of Enlightenment and
a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and
was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and
literature.
The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of
aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such
emotions as
trepidation,
horror and
awe—especially that which is experienced in
confronting the
sublimity of
untamed nature and its
picturesque
qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated
folk art and custom to something noble, and argued
for a "natural"
epistemology of human
activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom
and usage.
Romanticism reached beyond the
rational
and
Classicist ideal models to elevate
medievalism and elements of art and
narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to
escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and
industrialism, and it also
attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes
more authentic than
chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the
imagination to envision and to escape.
Our modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in
Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps
misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his
inspiration rather than the
mores of
contemporary society.
Although the movement is rooted in the German
Sturm und Drang movement, which prized
intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the
ideologies and events of the
French
Revolution laid the background from which Romanticism emerged.
The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence
on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities;
indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "
Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite
to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it
perceived as heroic individualists and artists, which would elevate
society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a
critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions
of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and
natural inevitability, a
zeitgeist, in the representation of its
ideas.
Characteristics
In a basic sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to
certain
artists,
poets,
writers,
musicians,
as well as
political,
philosophical and social thinkers of the late
18th and early to mid 19th centuries. It has equally been used to
refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that
era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise
characterization and specific definition of Romanticism have been
the subject of debate in the fields of
intellectual history and
literary history throughout the twentieth
century, without any great measure of consensus emerging.
Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the
difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The
Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his
Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars
see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some
see in it the inaugural moment of
modernity, some see it as the beginning of a
tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment—a
Counter-Enlightenment—and still others
place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution.
An earlier definition comes from
Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is
precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth,
but in the way of feeling."
Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key
movement in the
Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction
against the
Age of
Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment
emphasized the primacy of
deductive
reason, Romanticism emphasized
intuition,
imagination, and
feeling,
to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of
irrationalism.
Romanticism and music
In general, the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come
to mean the period roughly from the 1820s until around 1900. The
contemporary application of 'romantic' to music did not coincide
with modern categories, however: in 1810
E.T.A. Hoffmann called
Mozart,
Haydn and
Beethoven the three "Romantic
Composers", and
Ludwig Spohr used the
term "good Romantic style" to apply to parts of Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony.
Technically, Mozart and Haydn are considered Classical composers,
and by most standards, Beethoven represents the start of the
musical Romantic period. By the early twentieth century, the sense
that there had been a decisive break with the musical past led to
the establishment of the nineteenth century as "
The Romantic Era," and it is referred to as
such in the standard encyclopedias of music.
The traditional modern discussion of the music of Romanticism
includes elements, such as the growing use of
folk music, which are also directly related to
the broader current of
Romantic
nationalism in the arts as well as aspects already present in
eighteenth-century music, such as the
cantabile accompanied melody to which
Romantic composers beginning with
Franz
Schubert applied restless
key
modulations.
The heightened contrasts and emotions of
Sturm und Drang (German for "Storm and
Stress") seem a precursor of the
Gothic novel in literature, or the sanguinary
elements of some of the operas of the period of the
French Revolution. The libretti of
Lorenzo da Ponte for
Mozart's eloquent music convey a new
sense of individuality and freedom. The romantic generation viewed
Beethoven as their ideal of a heroic artist—a man who first
dedicated a symphony to Consul Bonaparte as a champion of freedom
and then challenged Emperor
Napoleon by
striking him out from the dedication of the
Eroica Symphony. In Beethoven's
Fidelio he creates the apotheosis
of the 'rescue operas' which were another feature of French musical
culture during the revolutionary period, in order to hymn the
freedom which underlay the thinking of all radical artists in the
years of hope after the
Congress of
Vienna.
In the contemporary music culture, the romantic musician followed a
public career, depending on sensitive middle-class audiences rather
than on a courtly patron, as had been the case with earlier
musicians and composers. Public persona characterized a new
generation of virtuosi who made their way as soloists, epitomized
in the concert tours of
Paganini and
Liszt.
Beethoven's use of tonal architecture in such a way as to allow
significant expansion of musical forms and structures was
immediately recognized as bringing a new dimension to music. His
later piano music and string quartets, especially, showed the way
to a completely unexplored musical universe.
E.T.A. Hoffmann was able to write of the supremacy
of instrumental music over vocal music in expressiveness, a concept
which would previously have been regarded as absurd. Hoffmann
himself, as a practitioner both of music and literature, encouraged
the notion of music as 'programmatic' or narrative, an idea which
new audiences found attractive. Early nineteenth century
developments in instrumental technology—iron frames for pianos,
wound metal strings for string instruments—enabled louder dynamics,
more varied tone colours, and the potential for sensational
virtuosity. Such developments swelled the length of pieces,
introduced programmatic titles, and created new genres such as the
free-standing
concert overture or
tone poem, the piano
fantasia,
nocturne
and
rhapsody, and the virtuosic
concerto, which became central to musical
romanticism.
In opera, a new Romantic atmosphere combining supernatural terror
and melodramatic plot in a folkloric context was most successfully
achieved by
Weber's
Der Freischütz (1817,
revised 1821). Enriched timbre and color marked the early
orchestration of
Hector Berlioz in
France, and the
grand operas of
Meyerbeer. Amongst the radical fringe of
what became mockingly characterised (adopting Wagner's own words)
as 'artists of the future', Liszt and Wagner each embodied the
Romantic cult of the free, inspired, charismatic, perhaps
ruthlessly unconventional individual artistic personality.
It is the period of 1815 to 1848 which must be regarded as the true
age of Romanticism in music – the age of the last compositions of
Beethoven (d. 1827) and
Schubert (d.
1828), of the works of
Schumann (d.
1856) and
Chopin (d.1849),
of the early struggles of Berlioz and
Richard Wagner, of the great virtuosi such as
Paganini (d. 1840), and the
young
Liszt and
Thalberg. Now that we are able to listen
to the work of Mendelssohn (d. 1847) stripped of the
Biedermeier reputation unfairly attached to it,
he can also be placed in this more appropriate context. After this
period, with Chopin and Paganini dead, Liszt retired from the
concert platform at a minor German court, Wagner effectively in
exile until he obtained royal patronage in Bavaria, and Berlioz
still struggling with the bourgeois liberalism which all but
smothered radical artistic endeavour in Europe, Romanticism in
music was surely past its prime—giving way, rather, to the period
of
musical romantics.
Visual art and literature
In visual art and literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in
the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "
sensibility" with its emphasis on women and
children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and
respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature.
Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as
Edgar Allan Poe and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their
writings on the
supernatural/
occult and human
psychology. Romanticism also helped in the
emergence of new ideas and in the process led to the emergence of
positive voices that were beneficial for the marginalized sections
of the society.
The Scottish poet
James Macpherson
influenced the early development of Romanticism with the
international success of his
Ossian cycle of
poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young
Walter Scott.
An early German influence came from
Johann Wolfgang Goethe whose 1774
novel
The Sorrows of
Young Werther had young men throughout Europe emulating
its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and
passionate temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of
small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal
influence in developing a unifying sense of
nationalism.
Another philosophic influence came from the
German idealism of Johann
Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling,
making Jena
(where
Fichte lived, as well as Schelling,Hegel,
Schiller and the brothers Schlegel) a center for early
German romanticism ("Jenaer Romantik"). Important writers
were
Ludwig Tieck,
Novalis (
Heinrich von Ofterdingen,
1799),
Heinrich von Kleist and
Friedrich
Hoelderlin.
Heidelberg
later became a center of German romanticism, where
writers and poets such as Clemens
Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and
Joseph Freiherr von
Eichendorff met regularly in literary circles.Important
motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, and ancient
myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example,
E. T.
A. Hoffmann's
Der
Sandmann (
The Sandman), 1817, and
Joseph Freiherr von
Eichendorff's
Das Marmorbild (
The Marble
Statue), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has
gothic elements.
In Spain, the Romantic movement developed a well-known literature
with a huge variety of poets and playwrights. The most important
Spanish poet during this movement was
José de Espronceda. After him there
were other poets like
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and the
dramatist
José Zorrilla, author
of
Don Juan Tenorio.
Before them may be mentioned the pre-romantics
José Cadalso and
Manuel José Quintana.
Spanish Romanticism also influenced regional literatures.
For
example, in Catalonia
and in Galicia
there was a
national boom of minor Spanish language writers, like the Catalan
Jacint Verdaguer and the Galician
Rosalía de
Castro.
Romanticism in British literature developed in a different form
slightly later, mostly associated with the poets
William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose
co-authored book
Lyrical
Ballads (1798) sought to reject
Augustan poetry in favour of more direct
speech derived from folk traditions. Both poets were also involved
in
utopian social thought in the wake of the
French Revolution. The poet and
painter
William Blake is the most
extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain, epitomised
by his claim “I must create a system or be enslaved by another
man's.” Blake's artistic work is also strongly influenced by
Medieval illuminated books. The painters
J. M.
W. Turner and
John
Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism.
Lord Byron,
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Mary Shelley and
John
Keats constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain.
In predominantly
Roman
Catholic countries Romanticism was less pronounced than in
Germany and Britain, and tended to develop later, after the rise of
Napoleon.
François-René de
Chateaubriand is often called the "Father of French
Romanticism". In France, the movement is associated with the
nineteenth century, particularly in the paintings of
Théodore Géricault and
Eugène Delacroix, the plays, poems and
novels of
Victor Hugo (such as
Les Misérables and
Ninety-Three), and the novels
of
Stendhal.
In Russia, the principal exponent of Romanticism is
Alexander Pushkin.
Mikhail Lermontov attempted to analyse and
bring to light the deepest reasons for the Romantic idea of
metaphysical discontent with society and self, and was much
influenced by Lord Byron. The poet
Fyodor Tyutchev was also an important figure
of the movement in Russia, and was heavily influenced by the German
Romantics.
In the United States, romantic gothic literature made an early
appearance with
Washington
Irving's
The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and
Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from
1823 onwards by the
Leatherstocking Tales of
James Fenimore Cooper, with their
emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape
descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by
"
noble savages", similar to the
philosophical theory of
Rousseau,
exemplified by
Uncas, from
The Last of the Mohicans.
There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's
essays and especially his travel books.
Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and
his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home,
but the romantic American novel developed fully in
Nathaniel Hawthorne's atmosphere and
melodrama. Later
Transcendentalist
writers such as
Henry David
Thoreau and
Ralph Waldo
Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination,
as does the romantic realism of
Walt
Whitman. But by the 1880s, psychological and
social realism was competing with romanticism
in the novel. The poetry of
Emily
Dickinson—nearly unread in her own time—and
Herman Melville's novel
Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of
American Romantic literature. As in England, Germany, and France,
literary Romanticism had its counterpart in American visual arts,
most especially in the exaltation of untamed America found in the
paintings of the
Hudson River
School. Painters like
Thomas Cole,
Albert Bierstadt and
Frederic Edwin Church and others often
combined a sense of the sublime with underlying religious and
philosophical themes. Thomas Cole's paintings feature strong
narratives as in
The Voyage of
Life series painted in the early 1840s that depict man
trying to survive amidst an awesome and immense nature, from the
cradle to the grave (see below).
Voyage of Life
Image:Cole Thomas The Voyage of Life Childhood 1842.jpg|
Thomas Cole, 1842,
The Voyage of Life
ChildhoodImage:Cole Thomas The Voyage of Life Youth
1842.jpg|
Thomas Cole, 1842,
The Voyage of Life
YouthImage:Cole Thomas The Voyage of Life Manhood
1840.jpg|
Thomas Cole, 1842,
The Voyage of Life
ManhoodImage:Cole Thomas The Voyage of Life Old Age
1842.jpg|
Thomas Cole, 1842,
The Voyage of Life
Old Age
Influence of European Romanticism on American writers
The European Romantic movement that took place in the late
eighteenth century reached America in the early nineteenth century.
American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic
as it was in Europe.
...Romantics frequently shared certain general
characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of
individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the
natural world is a source of goodness and human society a source of
corruption.
Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and
art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America
as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious
traditions of early settlement.The Romantics rejected rationalism
and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of
Calvinism, which involved the belief that the universe and all the
events within it are subject to the power of God. The Romantic
movement gave rise to New England Transcendentalism which portrayed
a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The new
religion presented the individual with a more personal relationship
with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans
in a similar fashion.
As a moral philosophy, transcendentalism was neither
logical nor systemized. It exalted feeling over reason, individual
expression over the restraints of law and custom. It appealed to
those who disdained the harsh God of their Puritan ancestors, and
it appealed to those who scorned the pale deity of New England
Unitarianism....[]...They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and
against the materialism of American society. They believed in the
transcendence of the "Oversoul", an all-pervading power for
goodness from which all things come and of which all things are
parts.
American Romance embraced the individual and rebelled against the
confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic
movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to
influence modern writers.Novels, short stories, and poems began to
take the place of the sermons and manifestos that were associated
with the early American literary principals.Romantic literature was
personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in
neoclassical literature. America's preoccupation with freedom
became a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many
were delighted in free expression and emotion without so much fear
of ridicule and controversy. They also put more effort into the
psychological development of their characters. "Heroes and heroines
exhibited extremes of sensitivity and excitement"
Nationalism
One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is the
assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic
art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the
movement, with their focus on development of national languages and
folklore, and the importance of local
customs and traditions, to the movements which would redraw the map
of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of
nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of
Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning.
Early Romantic nationalism was strongly inspired by Rousseau, and by the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who
in 1784 argued that the geography formed the natural economy of a
people, and shaped their customs and society.
The nature of nationalism changed dramatically, however, after the
French Revolution with the rise of
Napoleon, and the reactions in
other nations. Napoleonic nationalism and republicanism were, at
first, inspirational to movements in other nations:
self-determination and a consciousness of national unity were held
to be two of the reasons why France was able to defeat other
countries in battle. But as the French Republic became Napoleon's Empire, Napoleon became not
the inspiration for nationalism, but the object of its struggle. In
Prussia, the development of spiritual
renewal as a means to engage in the
struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a disciple of
Kant. The word Volkstum, or nationality, was coined in German
as part of this resistance to the now conquering emperor. Fichte
expressed the unity of language and nation in his address "To the
German Nation" in 1806:
Those who speak the same language are joined to
each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself,
long before any human art begins; they understand each other and
have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and
more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an
inseparable whole.
...Only when each people, left to itself, develops
and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and
only when in every people each individual develops himself in
accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with
his own peculiar quality—then, and then only, does the
manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to
be.
This view of nationalism inspired the collection of folklore by such people as the Brothers Grimm, the revival of old epics as
national, and the construction of new epics as if they were old, as
in the Kalevala, compiled from
Finnish tales and folklore, or Ossian, where the claimed ancient roots were
invented. The view that fairy tales, unless contaminated from
outside literary sources, were preserved in the same form over
thousands of years, was not exclusive to Romantic Nationalists, but
fit in well with their views that such tales expressed the
primordial nature of a people. For instance, the Brothers Grimm
rejected many tales they collected because of their similarity to
tales by Charles Perrault, which
they thought proved they were not truly German tales; Sleeping Beauty survived in their
collection because the tale of Brynhildr
convinced them that the figure of the sleeping princess was
authentically German.
Romanticism played an essential role in the
national awakening of many Central European peoples lacking their
own national states, not least in Poland
, which had
recently lost its independence when Russia's army crushed the
Polish Rebellion under Nicholas
I. Revival and reinterpretation of ancient myths,
customs and traditions by Romantic poets and painters helped to
distinguish their indigenous cultures from those of the dominant
nations and crystallise the mythography of Romantic nationalism. Patriotism,
nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also
became popular themes in the arts of this period. Arguably, the
most distinguished Romantic poet of this part of Europe was
Adam Mickiewicz, who developed an
idea that Poland was the Messiah of Nations, predestined to suffer
just as Jesus had suffered to save all the people.
Gallery
Image:Shipwrec-vernet.jpg|Joseph Vernet, 1759, Shipwreck ,
Groeninge Museum, Bruges
Image:John Henry Fuseli - The
Nightmare.JPG|Henry Fuseli, 1781,
The Nightmare, Detroit
Institute of Arts
Image:James Ward 001.jpg|James Ward, 1814-1815, Gordale
ScarImage:John_Constable_The_Hay_Wain.jpg|John Constable, 1821, The Hay
WainImage:I.C.Dahl Vesuv.jpg|J.
C. Dahl, 1826,
Outbreak of the Vesuvius, Städelsches Kunstinstitut,
Frankfurt am
Main
Image:The Wood of the
Self-Murderers.jpg|William Blake, c.
1824-27,
The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the
Suicides, Tate
Image:George Caleb Bingham 001.jpg|George Caleb Bingham, c. 1845, Fur traders
on the Missouri
River
Image:John Martin - Sodom and
Gomorrah.jpg|John Martin,
1852, The Destruction of Sodom
and GomorrahImage:twilight wilderness big.jpeg|Frederic Edwin Church, 1860,
Twilight in the Wilderness, Cleveland
Museum of Art
Image:Bierstadt LandersPeak 1863.jpg|Albert Bierstadt, 1863, The Rocky
Mountains: Lander's
PeakImage:corot.villedavray.750pix.jpg|Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, c.
1867,
Ville d’Avray
National
Gallery of Art
, Washington, DC.
Image:JWW TheLadyOfShallot 1888.jpg|John William Waterhouse, 1888,
The Lady of
Shalott, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
See also
Related terms
Opposing terms
Related subjects
Related movements
Romantic scholars
References
- Romanticism. Retrieved 30 January 2008, from
Encyclopædia Britannica Online
- Baudelaire's speech at the "Salon des curiosités
Estethiques
- For a detailed discussion of its musical manifestations, see
musical nationalism.
- Inherited from the galante pre-Classical style.
Bibliography
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Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, Bd.
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(University Press of America) 2000.
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